Every Quantum Helps: Operational Advantage of Quantum Resources beyond Convexity.

Identifying what quantum-mechanical properties are useful to untap a superior performance in quantum technologies is a pivotal question. Quantum resource theories provide a unified framework to analyze and understand such properties, as successfully demonstrated for entanglement and coherence. While these are examples of convex resources, for which quantum advantages can always be identified, many physical resources are described by a nonconvex set of free states and their interpretation has so far remained elusive. Here we address the fundamental question of the usefulness of quantum resources without convexity assumption, by providing two operational interpretations of the generalized robustness measure in general resource theories. First, we characterize the generalized robustness in terms of a nonlinear resource witness and reveal that any state is more advantageous than a free one in some multicopy channel discrimination task. Next, we consider a scenario where a theory is characterized by multiple constraints and show that the generalized robustness coincides with the worst-case advantage in a single-copy channel discrimination setting. Based on these characterizations, we conclude that every quantum resource state shows a qualitative and quantitative advantage in discrimination problems in a general resource theory even without any specification on the structure of the free states.

Entanglement Detection with Imprecise Measurements.

We investigate entanglement detection when the local measurements only nearly correspond to those intended. This corresponds to a scenario in which measurement devices are not perfectly controlled, but nevertheless operate with bounded inaccuracy. We formalize this through an operational notion of inaccuracy that can be estimated directly in the lab. To demonstrate the relevance of this approach, we show that small magnitudes of inaccuracy can significantly compromise several well-known entanglement witnesses. For two arbitrary-dimensional systems, we show how to compute tight corrections to a family of standard entanglement witnesses due to any given level of measurement inaccuracy. We also develop semidefinite programming methods to bound correlations in these scenarios.

State Exchange with Quantum Side Information.

We consider a quantum communication task between two users Alice and Bob, in which Alice and Bob exchange their respective quantum information by means of local operations and classical communication assisted by shared entanglement. Here, we assume that Alice and Bob may have quantum side information, not transferred, and classical communication is free. In this work, we derive general upper and lower bounds for the least amount of entanglement which is necessary to perfectly perform this task, called the state exchange with quantum side information. Moreover, we show that the optimal entanglement cost can be negative when Alice and Bob make use of their quantum side information. We finally provide conditions on the initial state for the state exchange with quantum side information which give the exact optimal entanglement cost.